Friday, November 30, 2012

We always enjoy it when Gerald Wilson "stops by" and brings along some of his music. The tune is Patterns and it features solos by pianist Jack Wilson, Carmell Jones on trumpet, Harold Land on tenor saxophone and Joe Pass on drums with Mel Lewis booting things along from the drum chair. You can locate our previous, two-part feature on Gerald in the blog sidebar.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

“Grant Geissman's latest CD
looks like a five-inch homage to the album-cover artist Jim Flora, with a
cartoon of the guitarist serenading a bikini-clad redhead on the cover, and a
collage in the center spread crammed with beatnik musicians, cats, birds and a
pink elephant. The disc itself is designed like a vinyl record, complete with
fake grooves.

Musically, Geissman takes a
step into the past too, abandoning his smooth-jazz track record in favor of
rootsy sound based in soulful hard bop, with a little New Orleans and upbeat
melodies that still go down smoothly without the gloss.

From the Horace
Silver-influenced title track to "Theme From Two and a Half Men,"
which gives the guitarist and Brian Scanlon (on soprano sax) a chance to blow
over the sitcom theme, Geissman proves himself to be no wallflower when he puts
his mind to it. But often tracks like "Bossa," with wordless vocals
by Tierney Sutton, or "Wes Is More," with an excessive section of
traded fours and twos with organist Jim Cox, come off more like bossa nova and
blues without the necessary roughness.”

“Grant Geissman's third in a
trilogy of wildly eclectic outings once again has the versatile guitarist
indulging in more than a few of his favorite things. From loping funk to
boogaloo to earthy blues shuffles, with a haunting ballad, a beautiful samba
and an urgently swinging post-bop romp thrown into the mix —along with touches
of classical, flamenco and zydeco — he covers all the bases with authority on “Bop! Bang! Boom!

'It's all stuff I'm
interested in and like to play, so it just comes out," says the San Jose
native who is well known for his improvised guitar solo on Chuck Mangione's
1978 pop crossover hit 'Feels So Good* and more recently for co-writing the
theme for the hit CBS-TV sitcom Two and a Half Men ("Men, men, men, men,
manly men!*] ‘I have eclectic tastes and the way I play and write follows that.
And since this album is on my own label, I get to do what I want!’”

- Bill Milkowski, liner notes

“One of the reasons I created
my own label, Futurism, was so that I could explore anything I wanted—which to
me is what an artist is supposed to do.”

- Grant Geissman

Like his
counterpart, guitarist Lee Ritenour, who is affectionately known as “Captain
Fingers” for his legendary ability to play any style of guitar at a moment’s
notice, Grant Geissman really knows his way around a recording studio.

Grant is a Pro’s
Pro: he brings it; he lays it down; it’s perfect. No need for another take.
It’s done. Let’s move on.

Given the amount
of money that record producers have to spend to develop an album, Grant’s
ability to make it happen and to make it happen right the first time is why
he’s first call on most contractor’s lists.

Grant also
understands the technical aspects of the studio; he's savvy about the processes
involved with making a recording. Whether it’s the sound board, the mix, the
use of electronics and synthesizers to create and enhance the music, Grant
knows about this stuff.

More importantly,
Grant knows enough about all of these elements of engineering sound so that he
can make them subservient to the final product – good music.

Grant also
surrounds himself with musicians who are at home creating Jazz in a studio
environment.

In recent years,
Grant has taken matters a step further with the formation of his own label - Futurism
Records.

Beginning in 2006
with Say
That! and following in 2009 with Cool Man Cool, Granthas
offered eclectic Jazz stylings that appeal to a wide range on interests: some
Smooth Jazz; some Latin Jazz; some straight-head Bebop – all infused with
Grant’s sophisticated studio sensibilities.

Bop! Bang! Boom!, the latest CD in the series, was released
by Grant on July 17, 2012

In addition to a
whole host of special guest such as saxophonist Tom Scott, guitarist Larry
Carlton and keyboard artist Russell
Ferrante who join Grant on selected tracks, there is the bonus of the artwork of
Miles Thompson that graces these CDs and is very reminiscent of the classic LP cover
art that Jim Flora developed for many RCA and Columbia classic Jazz LP’s in the 1950s.

Here’s what
Michael Bloom Media Relations had to say about Bop! Bang! Boom!:

“[This CD] is the
third album in a loosely fashioned trilogy that reflects Grant Geissman's shift
to more traditional jazz expressions. The powerfully eclectic follow-up to Say
That! and Cool Man Cool includes amped-up ventures into numerous genres
that reflect Geissman's multitude of passions.

The key to making
meaningful music for me is to not limit myself stylistically. I actually can't
envision writing an album where every track sounds the same. One of the reasons
I created my own label, Futurism, was so that I could explore anything I
wanted—which to me is what an artist is supposed to do. I don't know what
happens after Bop! Bang! Boom!, it might be completely different. But it's not
about having a master plan, it's about writing and recording music that excites
and inspires me.”

Geissman co-wrote
the Emmy-nominated theme (and also co-writes the underscore) for the hit CBS-TV
series Two and Q Half Men. He also co-writes the underscore for the hit series
Mike & Molly (also on CBS). As a studio musician, he has recorded with such
artists as Quincy Jones, Chuck Mangione (playing the now-classic guitar solo on
the 1977 hit "Feels So Good77), Lorraine Feather, Cheryl Bentyne, Van Dyke
Parks, Ringo Starr, Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band, Joanna Mewsom, Inara
George, Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello.”

Here’s a taste of
the music on Bop! Bang! Boom! The tune is Un Poco Español on which Grant plays his mellow-sounding 1972
Hernandis nylon string classical guitar with Russell Ferrante featured on
piano.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

“Nobody has seriously
challenged DeFranco's status as the greatest post-swing clarinetist, although
the instrument's desertion by reed players has tended to disenfranchise its few
exponents (and Tony Scott might have a say in the argument too). DeFranco's
incredibly smooth phrasing and seemingly effortless command are unfailingly
impressive on all his records. But the challenge of translating this virtuosity
into a relevant post-bop environment hasn't been easy, and he has relatively
few records to account for literally decades of fine work….”

“Dave McKenna
hulks over the keyboard…. He is one of the most dominant mainstream players on
the scene, with an immense reach and an extraordinary two-handed style which
distributes theme statements across the width of the piano.

McKenna is that rare
phenomenon, a pianist who actually sounds better on his own. Though he is
sensitive and responsive in group playing … he has quite enough to say on his
own account not to need anyone else to hold his jacket.”

In the 100+ years
that Jazz has been in existence, it has been expressed in any number of
instrumental combinations: combos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, octets,
tentets and big bands.

It almost seems
that as the popularity, and with it, the fortunes of the music, waned, the
smaller the groupings became.

The big bands of
the Swing Era were replaced by combos after WW II and these would soon be
reduced to piano-bass-drum trios. Sometimes locally-based trios served as
pick-up rhythm sections for horn players who traveled the Jazz club circuit of
major cities as guest soloists. It was cheaper for them to get booked into
local clubs this way. Star alto/tenor
saxophonist Sonny Stitt made his living this way for many years.

Throughout its
history, Jazz has had a long association with night clubs many of whose owners
were looking to pedal booze with the music serving as a convenient backdrop.

Jazz nightspots
like The Lighthouse and Shelly’s Manne Hole in southern California, The
Blackhawk in San Francisco, the Jazz Showcase in Chicago and Birdland and The
Village Vanguard, all of which featured the music as well as sold libations,
have become few and far between since their heyday from 1945-65.

Not that these
smoke-filled rooms were ever the best environment for the music let alone the
musicians, but at least they gave Jazz fans venues in which to hear the music
performed on a regular basis.

Duos have always
been around the Jazz scene, but they were generally formed by a pianist or a
guitarist backed by a bass player, in other words, an instrument to carry the
melody while the other played rhythm to keep the swinging sense of metronomic
time which is a key feature of Jazz.

This low-key
approach was generally favored by some of the smaller rooms that offered Jazz
and was usually easy on the wallet of the club’s owner. Adding horns and drums
to such an environment would overpower the patrons.

Not surprisingly,
with the passing of time and the diminishing of its fans base, Jazz solo piano
gigs also became ensconced in some clubs. Occasionally, a guitarist, or a
trumpet player with a mute or even a saxophonist who could keep the volume down
might drop by to sit-in with these solo pianists.

For many years,
one of the best pianists in Jazz was a frequent performer as a solo pianist in clubs
in the greater Boston area with occasional swings down to Newport, R.I. and to Florida for “the season.”

His name was Dave McKenna [1930-2008] and he always
maintained that, “[ … because of his fondness for staying close to the melody],
I’m not really a bona fide jazz guy”. Instead, he claimed, “I’m just a saloon
piano player.” Regulars at the Boston’s Copley Plaza Bar (now the Oak Room),
where Dave often performed, rebuffed this modest
remark by tellingMcKenna that he was ‘just a saloon player’ like Billie Holiday was ‘just
a saloon singer.’”

Thanks to the late
Carl Jefferson’s patronage, many lesser known, but not necessarily
less-skillful, solo pianists would have their work showcased on his Concord
Records Maybeck Recital Hall [Berkeley, CA] series which was issued in the 1980s and
1990s.

Concord also put out recordings with some of these pianists represented on
the Maybeck series paired with woodwind and reed players such as Alan Broadbent and Gary Foster, Kenny Werner
and Chris Potter, and my favorite, Dave McKenna and Buddy DeFranco.

Richard Cook and
Brian Morton of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. had this to
say about the DeFranco-McKenna collaboration:

“Concord threw a line to players of DeFranco's
sensibilities. The one to get … is the magisterial encounter with Dave McKenna, still as fiercely full-blooded as
ever at the keyboard, and musician enough to have DeFranco working at his top
level. 'Poor Butterfly', 'The Song Is You' and 'Invitation' are worth the
admission price, and there are seven others.”

Here’s what Dr.
Herb Wong had to say about the DeFranco-McKenna Jazz alliance in his insert
notes to Dave McKenna and Buddy deFranco: You Must
Believe in Swing [Concord
CCD-4756-2].

“Though rare up
until some 25 years ago, duos now occupy a pivotal niche in jazz. Their
interest stretches beyond mere curiosity; two-instrument bands face the
challenge of creating musical moments germane to their special environment
which neither solo musicians nor conventional small combos can furnish.

Most duos
highlight the beauty of musicians of similar styles and schools of thought
playing with a preferred consonant sound. On the surface, therefore, the
pairing of Dave McKenna and Buddy DeFranco might seem
unlikely. "At first thought, Dave and Buddy may not be a perfect fit, since
they come from somewhat different directions," recalls Dr. Dave Seiler, Director of the University of New Hampshire Jazz Band. "But we watched them rehearse - the
way they communicated was incredible!"

The background
trail leading to this unusual pairing is of interest. Born in the vision of one
Joe Stellmach, a devout fan and good friend of both McKenna and DeFranco, this
recording was inspired by the spectacular match-ups of DeFranco with super
piano icons Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson back in the 1950s. The prospect of
DeFranco's thorough mastery of the instrument (with his modern harmonic
vocabulary and improvisational skills) brought together with the extraordinary
pianism of McKenna (one of the most triumphant post-Tatum pianists) was
Stellmach's dream.

"I was
inspired to bring Dave and Buddy together - specifically Dave as the third prodigious jazz pianist to be
coupled with Buddy," said Stellmach, who was the catalyst in gaining the
enthusiasm of Concord Jazz to make this recording. Less than a week after the
teaming was agreed to, a debut concert was organized by local piano great Tom
Gallant and the aformentioned Dr. Seiler for October 9, 1996 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire as part of the Harry W. Jones, Jr. Jazz
Concert. Prior to this venue, McKenna and DeFranco hadn't really played
together other than brief jams at parties. A week later, they were in New York recording this CD.

DeFranco's esteem
for McKenna is markedly illustrated by this anecdote: "Two summer ago in New England, a friend of Dave's asked me if I'd like to go hear him play
solo in a hotel by the coast. I had a plane to catch later on, so I decided to
catch one set and then fly home. I wound up listening to the entire three
sets."

McKenna is an
anomaly in the world of jazz pianists; his two-handed style is so rhythmically
powerful that he's essentially self-sufficient. Ace trombonist Carl Fontana,
who has played with McKenna many times, simply said, "Daveis
a band. You don't really need one when he's around!" Pianist Dick Hyman
agrees, "He's his own rhythm section. The left hand plays a 4/4 bass line,
the right hand plays the melody, and there's that occasional 'strum' in between
- like three hands." Check his right hand off-beat single notes, and
unpredictable spaces promoting accents that create ear-tugging reactions.
Reminiscent of Tatum, McKenna's arpeggios at times seem like they're 50 feet
long.

"Dave plays a different way - an orchestral
way," DeFranco elaborates. "Of course, Errol Garner and Oscar
Peterson had it too, but Dave has a bass line going on all the time. He has the orchestral
melodic part, and those exciting chord progressions, but somewhere he sneaks in
what might be 'brass figures,' and it's fascinating to wonder how he gets them
in. He inserts these figures while everything else is going on."

McKenna explains
it quite simply: "I like to play a long line - like a horn player's single
notes, which also equate to single notes on a bass. Well, sometimes I'll pause
- take a breather in that line, and on occasion just throw in a chord or
two." His predilection for single note lines suggests that he has listened
a great deal more to horn players than he has to pianists.

Buddy DeFranco is
the titan of the modern jazz clarinet who had taken his instrument to the peak
of mastery decades ago and has maintained this preeminence internationally
since the forties. He has pushed his digital precision to its technical
boundaries, and early on merged his blazing, flawless execution with the vital
force of Charlie Parker's harmonic approach. With his devastating speed and
gorgeous, fluid tone, he improvises with emotional candor and blows nuclear
ideas that explode with surprising hues and shapes.

Speaking about
DeFranco, McKenna said firmly, "It was a real pleasure working with him.
Man, he's got it all! In a duo you have to be busy all the time. It's one of
the hardest things to do, but with a great horn player like Buddy - that's
something else! I really enjoy his musicality."

In a duo, each
musician is truly half of what happens. It's a matter of the freedom to express
and letting things happen with complete confidence — a process which shows the
music is worthy of risk. There's an enchanting aura about the numeral
"two". This duo reflects that mystifying magnificence. There is
something pristine about combining a piano note and a clarinet note. Dave McKenna and Buddy DeFranco share in tandem
a striking set of properties of integrity and musical character only mature
creative players experience. Their sophisticated knowledge and simpatico are
self-evident.

DeFranco said it
well: "If it doesn't swing, it isn't happening!"

You can savor the
duo delight that is Dave McKenna and Buddy DeFranco in the following video tribute which
features their performance of Tadd Dameron’s If You Could See Me Now. [Click on the “X” to close out of the ads
should they appear].

Saturday, November 24, 2012

A few years ago a
friend in Holland sent me a radio broadcast of bassist Pablo
Nehar’s tentet that was recorded in performance at the 1996 Jazzmarathon annual
festival which took place in October 13th in Groningen, The Netherlands.

It was my first
introduction to a style of Jazz that some refer to a “Paramaribop,” which
derives its name from blending “Paramaribo,” the capital of Suriname, with “Bebop.”

By way of
background, Suriname is located in the northeast corner of South America and was for many years ruled by the Dutch
as Dutch Guiana.

Paramaribo’s culture became a blend of native Indians, Dutch traders
and colonists, merchants and traders from other European countries, and West
African slaves. Musically, the city became a melting pot of styles similar to
that which had occurred in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th
century.

New Orleans’ culture was similarly a blend that was largely created by
the early, colonial French and Spanish Catholics, Creoles from the West Indies and Spanish America, European white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants
and West African slaves.

Jazz would emerge
from the interactions of these cultures in early 20th century New Orleans.

Juan Pablo Nahar
was born in Paramaribo, Suriname in 1952 and started the practice of music
at an early age.

Eventually moving
to Holland, he studied both privately and at
conservatories, and also spent some time in New York studying Jazz with Frank Foster the
legendary tenor saxophonist and composer-arranger with the Count Basie
Orchestra.

Upon his return to
The Netherlands, Pablo organized workshops at Bijlmer Park Theater in Amsterdam
that resulted in concerts of the fusion music then being experimented with by
musicians of Surinamese and Antillean origin who lived in that area of the
city.

In 1981, along
with drummer Eddie Veldman, Pablo co-founder the now legendary Surinam Music
Ensemble which pioneered the development of "Paramaribop,” a unique
combination of Afro-Surinam Kaseko/Kawina rhythms and the abstract and more
complex harmonies of Bebop.

A number of young,
Dutch Jazz musicians worked in Pablo Nahar’s groups and subsequently went on to
become great supporters of Paramaribop.

While all of these
players have made a huge footprint on the Dutch Jazz scene in other contexts –
the New Cool Collective, the Metropole Orchestra and Big Band, the Jazz
Orchestra of the Concertgebouw, the Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra, Nueva Manteca,
small groups headed by reed players Tinke Postma and Benjamin Herman - they
formed a group in 2005 which has since become known as The Ploctones, which
plays a style of music that has a deep allegiance to Paramaribop.

Nominally led by
guitarist Goudsmit who was awardedthe VPRO-Boy
Edgar Prize for 2010 as the best Jazz musician in Holland, all four musicians are very skilled
players with technique and ideas to burn.

In his Volksrant review of their first CD Live
Op Het Dak [VPRO
Eigenwijs–EW 0578],Koen Schouten described the group this way
[please forgive the Dutch-English tone as an online translator was used]:

“A group with a
rare solidity, determination and flexibility. A genuine four-headed monster.

Whether it concerns a rhythmic tour de force, a fun idea or a tearjerker, the
quartet always sounds solid and the group members never cease to surprise each
other. The changes and shifting times are whizzing past our ears.

With his ardent and passionate guitar playing the versatile and innovating
Anton Goudsmit developed into a musical chameleon without losing his
recognizable and characteristic style. His miscellaneous compositions are the
base of poetic improvisations and flashy power performances.

A critic of the British ‘Guardian’ described Goudsmit as: ‘the kind of musician
that makes you wonder where the fire escape is’.

He graduated cum laude at the Amsterdam Music Conservatory in 1995 and today he
can be reckoned as one of the most influential guitarists of the Netherlands.

Jeroen Vierdag is a strong and creative bass player who lifts the band up to a
higher level with his driving groove and great virtuosity, competing with his
6-string colleague. He’s been around in the field of pop, jazz, Latin and
Brazilian music.

Martijn Vink is an extremely passionate drummer with a peerless technique. One
moment he raises the roof and the next he colors and refines with the subtlety
of a musical box. He is the regular drummer of the internationally renowned
Metropole Orchestra and collaborated with many jazz giants like Pat Metheny, Herbie
Hancock and John Scofield.

Tenor saxophonist
Efraim Trujillo stands out in hectic compositions as well as in a more ambient
repertoire due to his open and dynamic playing. Because of his abundance of
experience and ability to do anything with his instrument he renews and
upgrades the music he plays and makes a concert of this group a special
experience for the audience and the band members, time and again. Trujillo played with Courtney Pine, Benny Bailey,
Steve Williamson and Bootsy Collins among many others.”

Since 2010, the
quartet has adopted a new name – The Ploctones – and you can learn more about
them on their website – www.ploctones.com/

See what you think of Paramaribop as Anton, Efraim, Jeroen and Martijn perform
their version of it on a tune entitled Boom-Petit
which servesas the soundtrack to the
following video.

One thing is
certain, Paramaribop is sure to move your ears in a different direction.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

“Gerry … was enormously
knowledgeable and skilled in harmonic structure and chord changes — all of
that. He could solo in a very linear fashion as well, but he may have wanted to
play in a more vertical way because we didn't have a piano. He played the piano
sometimes himself, and although he wasn't a great pianist, he knew what he
wanted to do on the in­strument. On baritone he was amazing, but sometimes it
was a little hard to play with him, especially on a double-time thing where he
would blow so many notes that he would get behind the time. I would be
scuffling along, try­ing to drag him with me, but that was because of that big,
awkward horn he was playing. Unlike an alto or tenor, it takes a long time for
the air to get through. I have great respect for him both as a writer and a
player.”

- drummer Larry Bunker as told to author Gordon Jack

“… it was Gerry's inimitable
presence that drove and de­fined the character and flavor of the group, and I
loved working with it. I couldn't wait to get to work each night, because it
was great being out there, totally exposed to the challenge of inventing
melodically interesting bass lines, strong enough to eliminate harmonic
ambiguity and simple enough to swing. I thrived on that challenge!

Of course Gerry's abilities
as an accompanist were phenomenal, and he had that vast pool of ideas to draw
upon, from all those years as an arranger. His forte was building spontaneous
arrangements, because he was something of an architect. It was really exciting
to walk a bass line and discover him moving along a tenth above, totally
enhancing the whole effect. He always had his ears open and expected the same
from his cohorts. With all due respect to the other guys, without Gerry's
accompaniment, there is no Gerry Mulligan Quartet.”

- bassist Bob Whitlock as told to author Gordon Jack

“Mulligan was one of the
quintessential jazz musicians of his genera­tion. As much as the silhouette of
Dizzy and his upturned trumpet, the image of bone-thin Mulligan, tall enough to
dominate the baritone, his hair country-boy red (before it turned great-prophet
white) had an iconic familiarity. … No
musician in the postbop era was more adept at crossing boundaries. Though a
confirmed mod­ernist credited with spreading the amorphous notion of cool jazz,
he achieved some of his finest work in collaborations with his swing era idols
Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges; he displayed a photograph of Jack Teagarden in
his studio.

Mulligan fashioned a music in
which all aspects of jazz commingle, from Dixieland two-beats and polyphony to
foxtrot swing to modern harmonies, yet he remained something of an outsider,
set apart by his devotion to certain not always fashionable musical principles,
including lyricism and civility. By lyricism, I mean an allegiance to melody
that, in his case, was as natural as walking. …

By civility, I mean his
compositional focus on texture. Mulligan was chiefly celebrated as a baritone
saxophonist, for good reason. He is the only musician in history to win a
popular following on that instrument, the only one to successfully extend the
timbre of Harry Carney and de­velop an improvisational style in the horn's
upper range. … the baritone best expressed his warmth, humor, and unerring ear
for sensuous fabrics of sounds. Yet he insisted he was less interested in
playing solos than an ensemble music— even in the context of his quartet. He
was, as he proved from the beginning of his career, a master of blending
instruments.”

- Garry Giddins, Visions of Jazz

“Gerry Mulligan lived through
almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should
be understood.”

– Gene Lees

In compiling
information from a number of highly regarded Jazz sources and configuring them
into a five-part feature on Gerry Mulligan [you can locate the first, four
pieces in the sidebar of the blog], it has been the intent of the editorial
staff at JazzProfiles to create a broad outline for a comprehensive and
critical [i.e.discerning] biography of Jeru and his music.

This listing is by
no means exhaustive and no doubt excludes other important essays and articles
about Gerry Mulligan.

Astoundingly and
not withstanding the 100+ pages of manuscript contained in the five
JazzProfiles Mulligan features and the fact that Gerry is the subject of a
permanent exhibit at the Library of Congress, there remains no definitive book
length treatment on the career and music of Gerry Mulligan!

Our thanks to Gordon Jack for allowing us to use his interview with
Gerry in Part Five of our feature about one of the most influential figures in
the history of Jazz.

Bill
Crow,
himself one of the subjects in Gordon Jack’s Fifties Jazz Talk, An Oral Perspective
[Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004, refers to
Gordon, as “… one of the jazz world’s most skillful interviewers. He asks all
the right questions and then gets out of the way, letting his subjects reveal
themselves.”

I’m sure you will
agree with Bill’s assessment after reading Gordon’s interview with Gerry
Mulligan, who reveals things about himself and his career that I never knew
before reading their 1994 talk.

[We have refrained
from populating Gordon’s piece with photos as none were interspersed in the
original chapter.]

“Gerry Mulligan
was born on April 6, 1927, in Queens, New York City. By the time he was seventeen, he was
contributing arrangements to Johnny War­rington’s band for their broadcasts on
WCAU, a local radio station in Philadelphia. Over the next few years his writing for
Elliot Lawrence, Gene Krupa, Claude Thornhill, Miles Davis, and Stan Kenton showed him to be one of the best of the
young postwar generation of arrangers. Although he played in all those bands
except for Kenton’s, he was far better known as a writer
than as an instrumentalist. It was not until his move to California in 1952 and the formation of his first
quartet that he really started to develop as a bari­tone soloist. We met on two
occasions at his suite in London’s Ritz Hotel in May 1994, and we
concentrated on his career until the demise of the Concert Jazz Band in 1964. I
hoped to continue our discussion at a later date, but Gerry died on January
20, 1996.

In the late
forties I played in a group with Kai Winding, Brew Moore, and George
Wallington, in clubs like BopCity in New York. We also recorded quite a lot, and we
visited Kansas
City
in 1947, which is where I first met Bob Brookmeyer, when he sat in on valve
trombone. At the same time I was play­ing and writing for Elliot Lawrence, and
I was featured in a quintet from within the band, with Phil Urso on tenor. When
I wrote “Elevation” for Elliot, he claimed a joint‑composer credit, which was
the convention with band­leaders in those days, but it was my tune. A little
later that band became very good when he had Charlie Walp on lead trumpet with
Ollie Wilson and the Swope brothers on trombone. Those guys were known as the “Washington brass section,” and Herbie Steward was
there, too, on lead alto. I remember walking into a rehearsal when they were
playing one of my charts, with Tiny Kahn on drums, and it was the first time I
heard a big band make my things sound really great. The first time that
happened with a small group was Georgie Auld’s little band, with Serge Chaloff
and Red Rodney.

For the Miles
Davis nonet I actually arranged seven of the twelve numbers that were recorded,
although I have seen most of them credited to somebody else over the years.
There were two other titles not included on the Birth of the Cool album, “S’il
Vous Plait” and “Why Do I Love You?” which were John Lewis arrangements. You
may have heard that Miles wanted another trumpet to play lead so that he could
concentrate on soloing, but that is quite untrue. He didn’t want to know about
another trumpeter, and remember, if we had someone else on lead, they would
have phrased the band into another area. Miles wanted to do it his way, and I
wanted him to do it his way. If you were writing for him in that band, you knew
exactly where you were, and I only wish I had written more for it.’

A lot of these
things seem easy in retrospect, because in 1992 we went on the road with the
“Rebirth of the Cool” band and worked with those charts. That’s really why I
did it, because I finally wanted an insight into those pieces, to see where we
might have taken them. Before the tour I thought a lot about the in­strumentation,
because I didn’t see any reason to be nailed to Miles’s nine-­piece. The Tentet
arrangements I had from California, for instance, had mo trumpets and two
baritones, and I liked the idea of two baritones. You can have them playing
unison in the ensemble, and it’s like a cello section, which is fun I really
wanted a baritone doubling clarinet, but finding somebody to do both became a
problem. Ken Peplowski was supposed to be with us, and
he was a nice guy and a beautiful player, but I didn’t want to push him into
switching from tenor to baritone. Unfortunately on the day of rehearsal, he
telephoned ill say that he’d been running for a plane at a small airport
somewhere when he slipped on the wet tarmac and broke his ankle. That’s when I
got Mark Lope­man, who is a fine musician, and he had done a lot of the
transcribing for me.

Getting back to
Miles’s band, we originally wanted to have Danny Polo or clarinet, but he was
on the road with Claude Thornhill all the time. During most of the years of
Thornhill’s success, he had two clarinets, Irving Fazola and Danny Polo, and
they both had this great wood sound because they played “Albert” system. This
was not “Benny Goodman” clarinet you know: we’re talking about something much
darker and richer, which were the timbres we were looking for. Anyway, Gil
Evans and I decided not to me‑s,, around with the clarinet if we couldn’t have
Danny. Miles liked the idea Av having a singer, so he had his friend Kenny Hagood sing a couple of number, one of
which, “Dam That Dream,” was recorded. For the 1992 “Rebirth” tour I rewrote
that arrangement, although what I actually did was to finish it. because I
wrote it in too much of a hurry for Miles. The other ballad we featured on the
tour was “Good‑bye John,” which I dedicated to Johnny Mercer.

Before I left the
East Coast for California in 1951, I had already started ex­perimenting with a
piano-less rhythm section, using trumpeters like Don Joseph [tpt], Jerry Lloyd
[tpt], or Don Ferrara [tpt], with Peter Ind on bass and Al Levitt on drums. It
was actually Gail Madden who suggested the idea. She played pi­ano and
percussion, and as a matter of fact I’ve recently been trying to find out what
happened to her. It was her experiments that helped me when I got to L.A., since I already had an idea of what would
and wouldn’t work. The last record date I did before leaving New York was in September for Prestige, playing my
compositions with Allen Eager [ts] and George Wallington [p], among others.
Gail played maracas on some titles, but the atmosphere was spoilt by Jerry
Lloyd, who couldn’t pass up the opportunity of making jokes about her boobs
bouncing up and down when she played. Jerry was an old‑guard male chauvinist
and couldn’t help it, but after a while, I sent the band home except for the
saxes. I didn’t want to do that thing with just Allen and me, but I had to
complete the album.’

I decided to leave
New York because the drug scene was a little out of
con­trol and the work was rapidly drying up, so I sold my horns and Gail and I
hitchhiked to California. I did a little work along the way, using borrowed horns,
mostly tenors, and I remember playing in a cowboy band outside Al­buquerque for a while. I was lucky, because I knew a
guy who was teaching at the university there, and he helped us keep body and
soul together. When we reached L.A., I sold some arrangements to Stan Kenton, thanks to Gail, who arranged the
introduction through her friendship with Bob Graettinger. She was really
responsible for Graettinger’s survival up to that point, because he was nearly
“done for” with alcohol, but when I met him, he was absolutely straight. I
liked him a lot, and he was in the thick of a reworked “City of Glass,” and he was also writing a cello and a
horn concerto. As a matter of fact, I had heard the original “City of Glass” when they were rehearsing at the
Paramount Theater in New York a couple of years before.

When I first got
to L.A., I did some playing with Shorty Rogers at Balboa with Art Pepper, Wardell Gray,
Coop, and June Christy. Shorty was very good and always used me whenever he
could, and I remember Bob Gordon was around at that time, and I liked him a lot. I soon met Dick
Bock, who was in charge of publicity at the Haig, and I started working there
with Paul Smith, who was the leader on the off‑nights, when the main attraction
had a night off. We worked opposite Erroll Garner’s trio, and when he left,
they brought in Red Norvo with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus. That’s when I
took over as leader on the off‑nights, using Jimmy Rowles until I got the
quartet together with Chet Baker, Bob Whitlock, and Chico Hamilton. I had
encountered Chet at jam sessions in the San Fernando Valley, so when it came time to put the group
together, I wanted to see how he would work out. Gail had already told me about
Chico, who was just finishing a gig with Charlie
Barnet’s seven‑ or eight‑piece band at the Streets of Paris down on Hollywood Boulevard. Car­son Smith took over from Bob later,
and being an arranger, a lot of the good ideas in the early quartet were his.
For instance the way we did “Funny Valen­tine,” with that moving bass line
which really makes the arrangement, was Carson’s idea. Chico thought of doing some a cappella singing
behind Chet on a couple of numbers, but Chet never sang solo with the quartet.
We played opposite Red Norvo for a while, then went up to the Blackhawk in San Fran­cisco for a few weeks before returning to the
Haig, this time as the main at­traction.

Bernie Miller
wrote “Bernie’s Tune,” but I never knew him. As far as I know, he was a piano
player from Washington, D.C., and I think he had died by the time I
encountered any of his tunes. He had a melodic touch, and he wrote a couple of
other pieces that musicians liked to play. The recording company wanted to put
“Bernie’s Tune” in my name but I refused, because I always objected to
bandleaders putting their names to something that wasn’t theirs, so I wasn’t
going to do it to Bernie Miller whether I knew him or not I told them to find
out if he had a family so that the money could go to his heirs. If he didn’t
have one, I would have claimed it to stop it going into the public domain. A
few years later Lieber and Stoller wrote a lyric for it, which I thought was a
little presumptuous; I hated the damn thing. They were nice enough fellows, but
I really resented them doing that.

Chico liked using brushes, because he was an admirer of the great brush
artists like Jo Jones, who was incredible ‑ also Gus Johnson and Shadow Wilson.
It would be a mistake, though, to think that the records are a total indi­cation
of what the group sounded like, because the drummer didn’t always use brushes,
even though a lot of the pieces were recorded that way. You know, when you
examine the recordings of the twenties, you find that Bessie Smith never used a
drummer at all, but nobody ever comments on that. Until it was possible to
isolate instruments through multi-tracking, a set of drums was hard to balance
with the rest of the band. This was especially so with cymbals. A lot of
recordings, even in the forties, had cymbals that tended to drown the main
attraction, hence the beauty of brushes in recording. I remember when we first
started rehearsing in Chet’s house down in Watts or somewhere in southeast
L.A., Chico would just use a snare, standing tom‑tom, stand cymbal, and a hi‑hat,
and that’s all, but when I looked in his trunk as he packed to go to the Haig
for our first date, he had a whole set of drums. I said, “Where are you going
with those?” and he said, “We’re going to work.” “Oh, no you’re not,” I said.
“This is not what you rehearsed with. I don’t want to get to the club and find
a surprise waiting for me.” So he came to work with the very minimum kit; then,
as time went on, he figured out he could add to the set without changing the
sound. It was always a kit geared to what we had rehearsed with and not a whole
big band set of drums.

Very little of
what we played was written, although my originals sometimes were. Chet and I
often put the arrangements together driving to the Haig, which is how we did
“Carioca,” for instance. He used to like singing the parts as we drove from his
house, and we worked out that arrangement by singing t. A lot of movie people
used to come and see us at the Haig, and one of the most regular was Jim Backus
(Mr. Magoo), who often brought his buddy David Wayne. Mel Ferrer and Anne
Baxter also used to come, and in fact, Anne had the quartet over to play at her
birthday party.

Some months after
our first records were released, Stan Getz showed up, playing at the Tiffany
club with Bob Brookmeyer and John Williams, who was a good piano player. Stan
used to sit in with us at the Haig, and I re­member a jam session at somebody’s
house, probably Chet’s, where Stan, Bob, Chet, and I were the front line, and
we worked really well, improvising on ensemble things that were great. Stan
decided that we should all go out to­gether as a group, only he wanted it to be
his group. Musically it was too bad that we couldn’t do it, but personality‑wise,
I don’t think it would have worked. Stan was peculiar; if things were going
along smoothly, he had to do something to louse them up, usually at someone
else’s expense.

Early in 1953 we
did the tentet album, and because I didn’t think Chet wanted to play lead, I
brought in Pete Candoli so that he didn’t have that re­sponsibility. In the
event, Chet wound up playing most of the lead parts any­way, so I had Pete, who
was a high‑note man, on second trumpet! Somehow this myth has grown that Chet
couldn’t read music, but people love myths. It’s more fun that way. There are
lots of myths about Chet and the gothic, ro­mantic life he lived and died; it’s
grist for that whole “Dark Prince” mode.

Both Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond had recommended
Dick Collins as a good replacement for Chet when I was reforming the quartet at
the end of 1953, but he wasn’t available. By this time I had become angry with L.A. any­way, so I telephoned Bob Brookmeyer in
New York and asked him to come out to California for rehearsals, and bring some New York musicians with him. Bringing guys from the
East was obviously expensive, but after rehearsals, we only had a couple of
dates booked before going back to the East Coast to work. He arrived with Bill
Anthony and Frank Isola, who had both been with Stan Getz. Before leaving town,
we did our one and only engagement with the ten­tet at the Embassy Theater in
downtown L.A., and that was quite an experi­ence. When I
looked through the curtains at 8 o’clock, it seemed as though we had bombed out,
because there was hardly anyone in the house. We decided to get the show
underway when someone came backstage very excitedly telling w to wait, because
people were lined up around the block. Apparently, the newspaper advertisement
for the concert quoted the wrong time. We wound up with a full house, and it
really was quite an evening. It was so exciting that some fans stole a couple
of the books, including mine, and it was at that point that we started to be
more careful with the music.

I had a second
baritone as well as the tuba in the tentet, because they do different things,
although the baritone is used in today’s big band setup as if it were a tuba,
but it’s not at all. However, I’ve finally realized that I don’t need a tuba,
because laying in all those bottom notes gets in the bass player’s way. Later
on, when I was organizing the Concert Jazz Band, I had intended to include a
tuba, but at that point, there was nobody I could count on who could cut the
book to go on the road with us. The third trombone was sup­posed to be a tuba,
so Alan Raph came in on bass trombone. What I
really wanted was Bob Brookmeyer, bass trombone, and tuba, which would have
given me a complete scale and palette, starting at the bottom and going
chromatically to the clarinet on top. I could have used flutes, but they
depended on amplification to be heard in that kind of band, and I didn’t want
to me­ss with that. I would have liked to have a couple of clarinets or
possibly a soprano sax and maybe even C trumpets to sustain higher tones.

When the quartet
reached New
York
early in 1954, I replaced Bill Anthony with Red Mitchell, who was one of the
best bass players I’ve had. Frank Isola was with me for most of that year, and
his thing really was to play time and keep out of the way, which worked out
alright. Most of the drummers approached the quartet like that, which I accept.
I hired guys because I liked the way they played, and Frank’s approach
established a precedent for the bard, whether I wanted it or not. It’s not
quite what I wanted, because I would rather have had a little more activity or
aggression in the rhythm section.

I had become used
to playing with drummers like Max Roach, and when we were in Kai Winding’s
group, he was wonderfully considerate, thinking like an arranger by injecting
melodic interest into what was going on. Very few drummers could do that. Most
of them were aggressive but didn’t add musical things that a writer would
appreciate, and as a soloist, I didn’t appreciate it either. Everyone should be
working together, and if anything, soloist should dictate where the solo goes.
If you were playing with Buddy Rich or Art Blakey, for instance, and they felt
it was time for the soloist to be pushing and getting into something climatic,
they’d start pushing, whether you were ready or not. Max didn’t do that because
he listened to the soloist and that is the kind of player I would have really
welcomed.

That was one of
the reasons why I always had problems with drummers, I needed somebody who was walking a thin line
between playing the non-aggressive smooth thing that, say, Lennie Tristano
wanted, where the drumm­er just kept time without any comments, but on the
other hand, not dropping bombs all over the place. Even Chico used to do that, which is one of the rea­sons
I took his bass drum away from him. He did it in Charlie Barnet’s band and I
said, “I’ll kill him if he does that to me!” You have to remember that we were
a totally acoustic group, and getting a balance to include the bass in the
overall sound meant coming pretty far down in volume. I always needed a drummer
who thought in terms of the ensemble sound, which is why Dave Bailey and Gus Johnson played the way they
did with the quartet. Now if a drummer has a way of doing that and being busy,
like Mel Lewis, for in­stance, that’s fine. Mel never actually played with the
quartet, which is a pity, because he carried on that chattering conversation
underneath your playing which I always liked. There would be punctuations, and
it would relate in a way that meant something in the construction. Gus
Johnson’s feel with the group was a lot different, but I had remembered how
polished he was from seeing him with Count Basie. He was fun, and he loved
playing brushes. As time went on, I was after drummers to play louder and use
more sticks, but I never really pressed the point.

Later on in 1954 I
was between trumpets and trombones, since I needed a replacement for Bob
Brookmeyer, and being in the East, I decided to try Tony Fruscella. Now Tony
had that fuzzy, introverted tone that Chet had, although Chet’s was more
outgoing while Tony’s was very inwardly directed. It sounded nice, but one
concert at the Newport Jazz Festival was enough for me to realize that having
Tony traveling with me and being onstage together night after night would have
driven me crazy. He lived in a world of his own, and when someone is a real
introvert, it can take all your strength just to sur­vive. They seem to have a
magnet sucking in your energy but nothing comes out, which is what shyness does
to people. For the professional life of con­certs in a band that works and
travels, your energy has to be up for it, and you can’t live in a world of your
own because you have to deal with the real world. Having a guy like Tony meant
I had to deal for myself and him too. It was too bad it didn’t work out,
because he was such a lovely player, but he just did that one concert with me.

It’s funny because
Stan Kenton was the M.C. at Newport that year, and he always had the amazing
ability of giving a speech that sounded so serious. You would be listening
attentively, until you suddenly realized that he’s not saying anything! I don’t
know how he did it, but it was all delivered with such oratorical sincerity
that you felt it was your fault for missing the point. To­wards the end of that
year, I recorded some titles with John Graas and Don Fagerquist in California. I loved the way Don played, and he would
have been an ideal trumpeter for the quartet, but he wasn’t available when I
needed him. At the end of 1954 I disbanded the quartet to go home to New York and write some new music.

In 1955 I sometimes played as a guest in Chet Baker’s
group, and I seem to remember a date in Detroit with him and Mose Allison. I also worked
at Basin
Street for a few weeks with Al Cohn, Gil Evans, George Duvivier, and Herb
Wasserman. Now Stan Getz was around the comer at Birdland, and he drove Al
crazy. Every time he was free and we were playing, he would come and watch Al
from the Peanut Gallery, staring up at him and making him feel uncomfortable.’
What he really wanted was to take Al’s mouthpiece and have it copied over at
Otto Link’s. Al kept refusing, but Stan pestered him for about ten nights until
he finally gave in. They met during the day, and Stan had it copied so that he
could get a sound like Al’s.

Later on that year
I formed the sextet, and initially Idrees Sulieman was on trumpet, but he just
did a couple of dates with us because we had a hard time getting together on a
style for the ensemble. I think he was an interesting choice, and the group would
have sounded a lot different, but we weren’t comfortable with each other,
because our stylistic approach wasn’t compati­ble. I have often wondered what
the sextet would have sounded like if we had aimed it in that direction. We ran
the group for quite a while, although I don’t remember all the reasons for not
continuing with it. Zoot Sims may have wanted to leave, because a soloist like
that would have found it to be a strait-jacket after a while, and I certainly
didn’t try to replace him; Zoot was Zoot.

After the sextet I
was “between groups,” and “between everything” at this point. I was really at a
low ebb, having had enough of being a bandleader for a while, because being the
leader can be a pain in the neck. You have to lay out the focus of the thing,
decide what to play, and arrange the transportation and hotels as well. There
have been periods when I have been fed up and looked for somebody else’s band
to play with, which happened much later when I worked with Dave Brubeck. I was just going to be a soloist
on one date; then we played in Mexico. One thing led to another, and I became
the saxophone player who came to dinner and didn’t leave for about seven
years! In 1956 I did a little
campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, who was the Democratic nominee for the
presidency, when he ran unsuccessfully against Ike. The following year, I worked a little with
Mose Allison, and I think that Chet and I took a group out together, although
it was primarily his group. We a
recorded a couple of albums, but there was never any talk of us getting
together permanently. Over the next couple of years I did a lot of recording. I
remember a session with Manny Albam, which was a nice L.P. with a good group
musicians, and it was fun playing in the ensembles. [Jazz Greats of Our Time,
Vol. 1, Coral CRL 57173]

I did a date with
Stan Getz which Norman Granz wanted us to do [Stan Getz Meets Gerry Mulligan in
Hi Fi, Verve 849 392 2]. He was recording Stan, but you can ­tell from
the material that we really didn’t have anything prepared. The jam session idea
is alright, but it has never been my bag, and it wasn’t my idea to switch horns
on some numbers; Stan or Norman suggested it. I liked Zoot’s and Brew Moore’s
mouthpieces, but I never liked Stan’s, and I didn’t like the sound I got on
it. I did an album with Monk, and having
Thelonious as an accompanist was a challenge [Gerry Mulligan Meets Thelonious Monk,
OJCCD 20 310-2]. We only played together
a couple of times, but I remember a jam session I finally dragged him to, where
we played “Tea for Two” and one other tune all night. He was trying to get us
to play “Tea for Two” the way Tatum played it, where the progression goes up
and then down in semi‑tones, and we had to try and follow him. In the mid
fifties we lived near each other in New York, hence my original “Good Neighbor Thelo­nious,”
because he lived on 63rd and I was on 68th Street near Columbus.

I also recorded
with Paul Desmond, who always wanted to do the piano­-less quartet thing, with
the alto playing lead instead of trumpet [Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet,
Verve 519-850-2]. Dick Bock produced an album with me, Lee Konitz, Al, Zoot,
and Allen Eager, which he called The Mulligan Songbook, Volume 1 [CDP
7243 8 33575 2 9] although I told him that title was a little optimistic. I
used Freddie Green on guitar, because I was always mess­ing around with the
rhythm section, trying to find out what to do with it, and I loved the idea of
playing with Freddie. The Annie Ross date was Dick’s idea, and although we
hadn’t worked together before, I liked her and the al­bum came out well. My
favorite record from the “Mulligan Meets . . . “ se­ries was the one with Ben
Webster, Jimmy Rowles, Leroy Vinnegar, and Mel Lewis [The Complete Gerry Mulligan Meets
Ben Webster Sessions, Verve 539-055-2]. We played quite a lot with that
group, including a feature on the Di­nah Shore T.V. show, and everybody could
be called a co‑arranger because they all made a contribution. Jimmy Rowles was
wonderful, and what he does is so deceptively simple, fitting things in so that
they become part of the whole. Unfortunately he is now very ill with
emphysema.”

In 1957 I did a
big band album which I didn’t complete, and consequently it wasn’t released
until about twenty years later [Mullenium, Columbia CK 65678] I
wasn’t pleased with the way things were going, because on the fast numbers I
couldn’t get my rhythm section together. I had Dave Bailey on one set of dates and Gus Johnson
on the other, and I realized that I had to write more for them, because there
wasn’t time for them to get to know the pieces like they would in a small band.
It created a problem which I couldn’t overcome, and George Avakian, who was the
A and R man for CBS, said to postpone everything until later. He then left CBS,
and it wouldn’t have come out at all if it hadn’t been for Henri Renaud. I
remember Don Joseph played beautifully on “All the Things You Are.”

When I formed the
Concert Jazz Band in 1960, Norman Granz’s financial input was pretty extensive.
He paid for a tour in the States to prepare us for a European trip, but I paid
for everything else, which is how I always ill‑spent any profit I was able to
make; I’ve always been a sucker that way! Judy Hol­liday did an album with us,
although she never sang live with the band [Judy Holiday with Gerry Mulligan DRG Records SLI 5191]. She should have done, because she
would have been more comfortable when we got into the studio. Judy always
joked, but it was only half‑a‑joke, that her way of going to work was to go to
the theater, heave, and then start to get dressed. Recording for her was worse,
but as she got to know the material, her sound would evolve, so it would have
been good if she could have sung with the band at some point. Phil Woods didn’t
record with us, but he was a regu­lar in the band whenever we could get him. He
was always pretty busy, but he played quite a lot with us at Birdland. Later
on, in the seventies, I formed another big band, and although I never really
dropped the name, the Concert Jazz Band was a particular band and
instrumentation in my mind.

After the CJB I
went back to the piano-less quartet with Bob Brookmeyer. until we finally
disbanded the group in 1965. Later that year I played with Roy Eldridge and
Earl Hines in Europe. I would have loved to play more with Roy, but they booked the tour in such a
ridiculous way, I wound up getting flu or something and I gave the whole thing
up. The sixties were turbulent years.

I have always
played a Conn baritone, but in the early sixties I used
a Selmer for about a year. Jerome Richardson was funny, because when I started
playing the Selmer, he said, “You sound peculiar. Why don’t you get your Conn back and sound like you’re supposed to.
That sounds awful­! Eventually the Selmer got damaged, so I went back to the Conn, and Jerome came into the Vanguard one
night and said, “Finally you’ve got your Conn and everything’s back to normal.” I never
did like the Selmer anyway, be­cause of the way it was balanced, with the short
neck on it.

Coming right up to
date, in January 1994 I was elected to the Down
Beat “Hall of Fame.” Somebody said, “What took so long?” and it’s true,
things do seem to happen slowly for me, but I guess I’m not considered to be a
fash­ionable elder. Popularity polls can be strange, because I started out as
at arranger and always think of myself as one, but I don’t show up in that cate­gory
at all, which used to bug me. Have you noticed in the Down Beat polls that nobody ever votes for my present quartet? If I
don’t have a piano-less quartet, it’s as though I don’t have a quartet at all.
You know, these things are fun to talk about, but I’ll have to stop, or we’ll
be here all night.”

Diz

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Wynton Marsalis

The Big Bands - George T. Simon

"A fat slice of pure nostalgia for everyone who is old enough to remember the big band era, and a good source book of information."

—New York Post

"Stirringly evocative of the fervid period when so many groups... 'swung freely and joyously,' filling listeners with an 'exhilarated sense of friendly well-being."' —Time

"George Simon could justifiably claim to have invented the big bands. He was their reviewer, reporter, booster, adviser, confidant, critic, and No. 1 fan...This book is the great and glorious record of it all."

—Christian Science Monitor

"Simon tells it like it all was."

— Frank Sinatra

It is almost as though you are reading a book of imaginative fiction; a genre that was once referred to as “science fiction.”

When I found a copy of the 4th edition of The Big Bands [New York: Schirmer Books, 1967] in the dollar bin at the local bookstore and started thumbing through its Table of Contents, the first thing that came to mind was that I somehow happened upon a Lost World.

The subheadings in Part One: The Big Bands - Then had subchapters entitled: The Scene; The Leaders; The Public; The Musicians; The Rise, the Glory and the Decline; The Vocalists, The Arrangers; The Businessmen; Recordings; Radio; Movies; The Press.

And these are only references to what’s contained in the first seventy-five pages of the book!

Part Two - Inside The Big Bands hassubchapters on 72 major big bands.

Part Three Inside More of the Big Bands has sub chapters with titles like The Arranging Leaders, The Horn-Playing Leaders, The Reed-playing Leaders, The Piano-playing Leaders, The Violin-playing Leaders, The Singing-Leaders, The Mickey Mouse Bands, The Veterans, “And Still More Bands.” And it concludes with a listing of “two hundred more bands.”

Can you imagine?

For all intents and purposes, Mr. Simon’s book is a description of what was popular music in the USA for two decades, from about 1930-1950 and then it all disappeared with the exception of about a dozen or so big bands that eked out a living when the taste of the country turned to other kinds of music.

But while it lasted, the era of the Big Bands sure put on some show.

George T. Simon was certainly one lucky fellow as he got to live through all of the music from what Chuck Cecil refers to as “The Swinging Years.” Not only that, he got to earn a living while writing about it for Metronome magazine.

GEORGE T SIMON joined Metronome magazine in 1935, at the dawn of the big band era, remaining there for twenty years, the last sixteen as editor-in-chief.

He had begun his musical career by leading his own band at Harvard, and later helped organize the Glenn Miller orchestra, for which he played drums. Winner of a Grammy for distinguished writing and of the first Deems Taylor/ASCAP award, he has contributed articles and reviews to leading newspapers and magazines. A producer, writer and music consultant for network television and radio, he has also produced jazz and pop recordings for many major labels.

He is the author of The Best of the Music Makers, The Big Bands Songbook, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Simon Says: The Sights and Sounds of the Swing Era, and The Feeling of Jazz.

We wanted to remember the Big Band Era and Mr. Simon’s marvelous book about this “Lost World” on these pages with the following excerpts as published in Robert Gottlieb, editor, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now [New York: Pantheon, 1996].

THE SCENE

Do you remember what it was like? Maybe you do. Maybe you were there. Maybe you were there in New York two-thirds of the way through the 1930s, when there were so many great bands playing—so many of them at the same time. You could choose your spots—so many spots.

You could go to the Madhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania, where Benny Goodman, the man who started it all, was playing with his great band, complete with Gene Krupa.

You could go a block or so farther to the Terrace Room of the Hotel New Yorker, and there you'd find Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra with Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell ... or to the Blue Room of the Hotel Lincoln to catch Artie Shaw and his band with Helen Forrest ... or to the Green Room of the Hotel Edison for Les Brown's brand-new band.

Maybe you'd rather go to some other hotel room—like the Palm Room of the Commodore for Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey and their soft, subtle swing ... or to the Grill Room of the Lexington for Bob Crosby and his Dixieland Bobcats . . . or to the Moonlit Terrace of the Biltmore for Horace Heidt and his huge singing entourage ... or down to the Roosevelt Grill for Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians and their extra sweet sounds.

And then there were the ballrooms—the Roseland with Woody Herman and the Savoy with Chick Webb. Not to mention the nightclubs—the Cotton Club with Duke Ellington, or the Paradise Restaurant, where a band nobody knew too much about was making sounds that the entire nation would soon recognize as those of Glenn Miller and his Orchestra.

Maybe you didn't feel so much like dancing but more like sitting and listening and maybe taking in a movie too. You could go to the Paramount, where Tommy Dorsey and his band, along with Jack Leonard and Edythe Wright, were appearing ... or to the Strand to catch Xavier Cugat and his Latin music ... or to Loew's State, where Jimmie Lunceford was swinging forth.

And if you had a car, you could go a few miles out of town ... to the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle to dance to Larry Clinton's music with vocals by Bea Wain ... or to Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook across the bridge in New Jersey to catch Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra with Peewee Hunt and Kenny Sargent.

Of course, if you didn't feel like going out at all, you still were in luck— and you didn't have to be in New York either. For all you had to do was to turn on your radio and you could hear all sorts of great bands coming from all sorts of places—from the Aragon and Trianon ballrooms in Chicago, the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood, the Raymor Ballroom in Boston, the Blue Room of the Hotel Roosevelt in New Orleans, the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, the Steel Pier in Atlantic City and hundreds of other hotels, ballrooms and nightclubs throughout the country, wherever an announcer would begin a program with words like "And here is the music of-------!"

The music varied tremendously from style to style and, within each style, from band to band. Thus you could hear all types of swing bands: the hard-driving swing of Benny Goodman, the relaxed swing of Jimmie Lunceford, the forceful Dixieland of Bob Crosby, the simple, riff-filled swing of Count Basie, the highly developed swing of Duke Ellington, and the very commercial swing of Glenn Miller.

Many of the big swing bands were built around the leaders and their instruments—around the clarinets of Goodman and Artie Shaw, the trumpets of Harry James and Bunny Berigan, the trombones of Jack Teagarden and Tommy Dorsey, the tenor sax of Charlie Bar net, the pianos of Ellington and Count Basie and the drums of Gene Krupa.

And then there were the sweet bands. They varied in style and in quality too. Some projected rich, full, musical ensemble sounds, like those of Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Isham Jones, Ray Noble and Glenn Miller. Others depended more on intimacy, like the bands of Hal Kemp and Guy Lombardo and of Tommy Dorsey when he featured his pretty trombone. Others played more in the society manner—Eddy Duchin with his flowery piano and Freddy Martin with his soft, moaning sax sounds. And then there were the extra sweet bandleaders. Lombardo, of course, was one. So was his chief imitator, Jan Garber. So was the Waltz King, Wayne King.

And there were the novelty bands, generally lumped in with the sweet bands—Kay Kyser, with all his smart gimmicks, including his College of Musical Knowledge and his singing song titles; Sammy Kaye, who also used singing song titles and introduced his "So You Wanna Lead a Band" gimmick; and Blue Barron, who aped Kaye . . . and so many others who aped Barron, who aped Kaye, who aped Kyser, who aped Lombardo.

There were so many bands playing so many different kinds of music— some well, some adequately, some horribly—all with their fans and followers. The Metronome poll, in which readers were invited to vote for their favorite bands in three divisions (Swing, Sweet and Favorite of All), listed almost three hundred entries in each of the four years from 1937 through 1940. And those were merely the bands that the readers liked most of all! There were hundreds more all over the country that didn't even place.

Why were some so much more successful than others? Discounting the obvious commercial considerations, such as financial support, personal managers, booking offices, recordings, radio exposure and press agents, four other factors were of paramount importance.

There was, of course, the band's musical style. This varied radically from band to band. A Tommy Dorsey was as far removed from a Tommy Tucker as an Artie Shaw was from an Art Kassel or a Sammy Kaye was from a Sam Donahue. Each band depended upon its own particular style, its own identifiable sound, for general, partial or just meager acceptance. In many ways, the whole business was like a style show—if the public latched on to what you were displaying, you had a good chance of success. If it rejected you, you'd better forget it.

Generally it was the band's musical director, either its arranger or its leader or perhaps both, who established a style. He or they decided what sort of sound the band should have, how it should be achieved and how it should be presented, and from there on proceeded to try to do everything possible to establish and project that sound, or style.

Secondly, the musicians within a band, its sidemen, played important roles. Their ability to play the arrangements was, naturally, vitally important. In some bands the musicians themselves contributed a good deal, especially in the swing bands, which depended upon them for so many solos; and in the more musical bands, whose leaders were willing to listen to and often accept musical suggestions from their sidemen.

But the musicians were important in other ways too. Their attitude and cooperation could make or break a band. If they liked or rejected a leader, they would work hard to help him achieve his goals. If they had little use for him, they'd slough off both him and his music. The more musical the band and the style, the greater, generally speaking, the cooperation of its musicians in all matters—personal as well as musical.

Salaries? They were important, yes, in the bands that weren't so much fun to play in. But if the band was good musically and if the musicians were aware that their leader was struggling and couldn't pay much, money very often became secondary. Pride and potential, and, most importantly, respect usually prevailed.

Thirdly, the singers—or the band vocalists, as they were generally called— often played important roles in establishing a band's popularity, in some cases even surpassing that of the band itself. A good deal depended upon how much a leader needed to or was willing to feature a vocalist. Most of the smarter ones realized that any extra added attraction within their own organization could only redound to their credit. Even after many of those singers had graduated to stardom on their own, their past relationships with the bands added a touch cf glamour to those bands and their reputations.

Thus such current stars as Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford still bring back memories of Tommy Dorsey, Doris Day of Les Brown, Ella Fitzgerald of Chick Webb, Peggy Lee of Benny Goodman and Perry Como of Ted Weems.

But of all the factors involved in the success of a dance band—the business affairs, the musical style, the arrangers, the sidemen and the vocalists— nothing equaled in importance the part played by the leaders themselves. For in each band it was the leader who assumed the most vital and most responsible role. Around him revolved the music, the musicians, the vocalists, the arrangers and all the commercial factors involved in running a band, and it was up to him to take these component parts and with them achieve success, mediocrity or failure.”

Given the enormous range of big bands, it was very difficult to select one as a video example for this piece, but I decided to go with one that features the Benny Goodman Orchestra as in many ways, Benny’s initial success at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935 paved the way for the craze that became The Big Band Swing Era in American Popular Music.

The video features Benny’s 1937 recording of Bugle Call Rag, The arrangement is by Dean Kincaide and the soloist are Babe Russin [tenor saxophone], Harry James [trumpet], Murray McEachern [trombone] and Benny [clarinet] with the irrepressible Gene Krupa booting things along in the drum chair.